Chapter 2
“Well, whose is it?”
Bucky sat in what was described on the real estate website as a cosy apartment in a reconstructed pre-revolutionary house. Cosy was enough of a term, as it was only one room, and the radiator that was expected to keep them heated through the winter was not enough to warm even Natalia’s pinkie toe, never mind her feet, scarred from dancing. He was wearing a pair of leather gloves with the fingers cut out so that he could type, because even his professors back in America hated him at that moment.
Outside, snow did not flutter down neatly to the ground as it had back home in Leavenworth, as it would have been as he spoke. Instead it cascaded down in torrents, as thick as a rainstorm and as white as the ashes of hell, and Bucky found it very hard to keep his mind off his sisters, and how they would be out constructing snowmen back home, their eyelashes sprinkled with snowflakes, their lips as red as the poinsettias his ma put in the wreath on the front door.
Natalia loved the snow, but only when it was already on the ground. On days like this, where it still poured from the heavens and coated the slippery streets, she said it reminded her too much of fire, the sparks that flickered off and burnt her childhood home to the ground, her parents still inside. Bucky wasn’t aware of what loss felt like – at least, he hadn’t been – but he could see the hardness in Natalia’s eyes, could feel the weight on her shoulders transferring to his own.
On days like these, they both stayed indoors, in their shitty little apartment, Natalia’s feet like two blocks of ice pressing against his thigh.
Her feet were not anywhere near him after his question. She was only on the other side of their two-seater sofa, but she felt as far from him as Steve did, wherever the other man was. It felt so strange to him to not know where he was, when they had been attached at the hip for so many years.
Natalia’s green eyes narrowed. She could always tell when Bucky was thinking about him. Her red hair was poker straight, a new look she had been experimenting with. She said it was easier to maintain, but it didn’t suit her as much as the curls. That was how Bucky knew he didn’t love her, not the way he was supposed to; men didn’t usually look at Natalia and think she was unsuitable for anything. Men usually looked at Natalia and wanted everything Bucky already had, everything he should’ve felt lucky for.
He didn’t love her. He didn’t feel lucky. At times he felt sick. Others, he felt used. Sometimes he wondered what they could’ve been if he hadn’t kissed her that day in the playground, when she spoke Russian to him and he could feel it shoot right down to the bottom of his stomach.
“Hey,” Bucky said. He reached out a gloved hand to touch her, but his cold fingers came up short. She moved her bare legs towards her chest and clutched them like she had held him just last night. He wondered if she had known then what she had only told him five minutes before. “Natalia, please.”
She sighed. She was thinner in Moscow than she was in Leavenworth. It suited her, but also made her more pointed, more like a crow than a robin, all sharp edges so her skin matched her eyes. Nonetheless, she hadn’t had any problem picking up suitors. (When he saw men looking at her, he placed a protective hand on her hip, not caring that she wasn’t his, that he didn’t want her to be his, that he wanted someone else.) Perhaps it was because she didn’t eat as much, or at all, when he thought about it, or maybe it was because she tasted the cigarettes off his tongue and got addicted herself. It would explain the empty packets he found in the trash and never said a word about.
Bucky didn’t say a word about a lot of things. It was one of his issues.
The silence hung thickly in the air, and the lump in his throat had quickly lodged itself in his stomach. Natalia liked playing games; she liked to pretend she didn’t, but it was something left over from her time in the orphanage, some psychological trick she liked to pull with the younger girls or the older boys to get some extra food. It was a survival tactic, mind games. Bucky knew more about it than he cared to let on.
“Natalia,” he said. There was a hint of begging in his voice, though he wasn’t the type to plead. He had been raised with more strength than that. “Natalia, cut it out. I need to know.”
Natalia spat out some tobacco she had been chewing. It landed on the floor. Bucky knew he would be the one to clean it up. He didn’t care. His mind was racing a mile a minute.
“Just a name, Nat. Come on. Is it me or Alexei?”
She did not reply. She did not know. Though of course she knew, otherwise she wouldn’t have brought it up to him. It was his.
He ran his hands through his hair and swallowed a few times fast. “Fuck,” he said. Natalia spat a little more onto the grotty floorboards. “Fuck, fuck fuck.”
She said nothing. Bucky gave a loud groan and pushed himself up from the sofa in one quick movement.
That spooked her. Years of experience had taught her not to show fear, but Bucky could see the tension in her shoulders. She did not like men when they got irritated, so he tried his best to remain calm. Since becoming friends with her, it had became part of his personality, an attribute that many had complimented him on.
He didn’t feel right playing games with Natalia. He loved her more than the stars and moon (perhaps not the sun). But he needed answers out of her. He needed to know the details so he could start to fix whatever mess they had made together. He needed to know so he could fix it, like he was expected to fix everything.
“Fuck’s sake,” he said, his back to her.
He slammed a glass from the table into the sink, and watched as it smashed under his hands. The leather stopped it from cutting his palm, but his fingers got the brunt. He swore under his breath.
“It’s not my fucking fault you’re cheating on your fiancé, Romanoff,” Bucky snapped, turning around to face her. She had crumpled in on herself. He reminded her of her father; not Fury, who was scary to everyone but her, but the other father, her biological father, who she barely spoke about. Bucky didn’t need to hear the words come out of her mouth to know what he’d done to her.
Blood spurted from the corner of her mouth, spreading over her lip as she chewed at it. Eye contact was never a problem for her, and even as she was hurting she maintained it. It was intense, but Bucky did not back down from a fight. He never backed down from a fight; that’s why he thought … that’s why he was sure that eventually, sometime, maybe Steve would …
It didn’t matter. Steve didn’t love him, he’d made that clear. Natalia’s words still rung loud and clear in his ear every time he thought of him: “He fucking left you! He fucking left all of us, and you’re spending your time screwing half the city trying to forget that you were in love with your best friend! Pathetic.”
It was both rich and ironic that Natalia had done much the same thing in her attempts to forget Clint Barton’s existence. Bucky had not been witness to whatever went down between them at the airport directly before the two left for Russia, but he had noticed the distinct lack of text messages and video chats from Barton, when he and Romanoff had been inseparable for years.
Relationships changed, though. He needed to accept that. He needed to-
He had other things to focus on.
“Does Alexei know?” he asked, his voice back to calm and controlled. Even though she was still being interrogated, Natalia relaxed, at least minutely. Bucky was pleased. He didn’t like frightening her. It made him remember she was a human too.
“Know what?” she said, the first thing she had deemed important enough to utter. “That I’m fucking my roommate? Is that what you’re referring to?”
Keeping his voice low had the unfortunate side effect of allowing Natalia to wipe the floor with him.
“Shut the fuck up,” Bucky muttered, turning back to the dishes. “Shut the fuck up, Natalia. You know why we’re…”
“I know why you’re doing it. I don’t know why the fuck I’ve messed up a good thing doing it.”
“That’s kind of your thing, though,” Bucky said, shrugging his shoulders. “You fuck people, and you fuck things up.”
Thank God for his youth spent on the sports field. It allowed him to dodge the glass that Natalia threw directly at his head. It wasn’t the first time; she liked grabbing whatever she could and throwing it at people. For the first few years, Bucky had given her the benefit of the doubt, but there was only so much you could blame on trauma.
Natalia’s eyes were bloodshot. There were red spots high on her cheeks, and her chest was heaving like she’d ran a marathon.
“Don’t – you – fucking – dare,” she said. “If you’re calling me a slut Barnes, I swear to God…”
“How the fuck can I call you a slut? I’m the one who slept with you in the fucking Love Barn, even if I didn’t know you were a virgin at the time…”
“You slept with Jane in the Love Barn,” she snapped. “You slept with me at my house-party, right before Dad came home. Do you seriously not give a shit about anyone unless they’re called James or Steve?”
A muscle twitched in Bucky’s jaw. “Don’t talk about Steve,” he said.
Natalia put a hand to her head. “You’re right,” she said. She paused. “Sorry. I promised I wouldn’t…”
“Yeah.” Bucky grabbed a beer from the fridge. At the same time, he and Natalia flopped back onto the sofa. “So,” he said. “You might be pregnant.”
“Yeah. Might be.”
“It might be mine.”
“Would probably be yours. I haven’t slept with Alexei in weeks.”
Bucky took his mouth away from the rim of the beer bottle to look at her. It was like the first time; a small, ginger kid with red eyes and redder lips. It was always her lips, chapped and red, that reminded him of…
He leaned over, very carefully so as not to make her bolt again, and pressed his lips softly against her mouth. She tensed up underneath him, but within seconds relaxed, and he felt her breath against his upper lip.
“We’ll figure this out,” he said, eyes still closed, bringing her hand up to his mouth. Her fingers, if he kid himself enough, were thin, bonier at the knuckles than anywhere else, paler than the rising sun. Artist’s hands. He put her fingers in his mouth and listened to the sweet intake of breath.
Finally, he opened his eyes, just so he could touch her cheek, so he could press another kiss to her mouth. Another tender kiss followed, and because it was such an anomaly, Natalia buried her face in his chest to avoid him witnessing such a moment of weakness.
“You must’ve really loved him,” she said.
Bucky pressed a kiss to her head. “You promised.”
A soft sigh. “I know,” Natalia replied. “Sometimes I just wish I hadn’t.”